If Samuel Beckett's plays sometimes feel like an expression of the annihilating possibility that there is nothing to express, that is nowhere more true than in these three late pieces. They are performed here by Lisa Dwan in an evening that lasts a bare hour but encompasses the agonies of many lifetimes. Curiously, the effect is less dispiriting than you might expect. After all, performer and audience are all in this together.

The lights are extinguished and we are suddenly as much in the dark as the woman in Not I, who is reduced merely to a mouth; or May in Footfalls, who constantly paces but never arrives anywhere; or the elderly woman in Rockaby who faces death having never found another person with whom she can communicate.

Try to ensure that you are in the centre of a row for Not I, as the impact is somewhat diminished from the side. Dwan's swift execution, however, remains no less impressive than when this play was a standalone at the Royal Court last year. There is a sense of terror and yet also of defiance as the words fall from her open, wound-like mouth, each one an agony and a torture. The voice is uncontrollable; its delivery is totally controlled. Even so, it puts the audience in an almost painful position as we try fruitlessly to keep up.

Acts of remembering and forgetting, and how the two are intimately linked, are also explored in the other plays. "Will you never have done? Will you never have done revolving it all?" asks the mother in Footfalls, of the daughter who cannot stop walking in search of something that happened, a secret or suppressed memory, an "it" that remains forever elusive. Dwan's figure emerges as a spectre from the gloom, a woman apparently haunting herself, who might not exist at all. It's eerie. In Rockaby, meanwhile, death offers the only possibility of mercy. Here, once again, a woman re-examines her past – only to discover it is so far out of her reach that present and future are rendered blank. Taken together, this is an hour that feels like being trapped in somebody else's nightmare.

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